1-Behind the scenes starting a code school
Welcome to the 1st episode of Sorry For Helping. Mike and Jeff worked for several years together in the coding bootcamp space. They share a passion for teaching students a skill set that will quite literally change their lives and their families' lives forever.They are now on a mission to continue to make a dent in education and are working on two different approaches to facilitate junior developers' entrance into the marketplace. They were talking at length every week for the past 18 months on various ways to make a sustainable model that would allow them to successfully place students in their new roles.They decided to start recording these conversations moving forward so others could come along for the journey and share any insights they are missing on how to fix and improve the accessibility and sustainability of tech education.In this first episode, we’ll just get a little background on why they are qualified to solve some of these problems and ways they’ve solved previous problems when they joined forces in a previous coding bootcamp. (1:12) Mike starts his first code school, Starter Academy, and discusses his first learning about the code school industry.(7:15) Mike talks about how Jeff recruited him to work at Origin Code Academy(15:24) Debating what was the best curriculum to use at Origin Code Academy and the thought process behind that as well as the internal debate within the company. Ultimately, we changed the curriculum from Angular 1 to React, and C# to Node to become full-stack javascript.(20:13) Mike predicted that React would become widely adopted so it was implemented into the curriculum (25:32) Origin closes and Mike transitions to starting San Diego Code School(31:49) Jeff gives his background and how he got into tech because of his relationship with Epic Game developers (34:52) Jeff talks about how painful the hiring process was in going from Code School to Junior Developer (36:44) What does the future of code schools look like during our ‘new normal’?(38:32) Would we advise people to sign up to a code school right now?(41:30) Why Tony Robbins could help you learn how to code better than coding tutorialsMentions:Jeff WardKyle SimpsonTrey HunterTodd BasharCameron Wilby